More people share photos on Snapchat than Instagram

Mary Meeker’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Internet report just landed yesterday, and this year it’s evident that social photography is still ruling the digital landscape. Even while new experiments in video like Vine have entered the fray, it’s apps that share stills that continue to draw in users and see increased activity. While you might think Instagram is sitting pretty on top of all this growth, it’s none other than Snapchat that has seen the biggest bump

The growth of short-term sharing apps, like Snapchat, is “exploding,” according to the report. Less than one year ago, short-term photo-sharing started with just several million uploads, but has now reached approximately 150 million photos shared per day, as Meeker’s data shows.

In fact Snapchat alone has eclipsed Instagram in 2012 and 2013 (to date) when it comes to the number of uploads per day. So was Facebook crazy to have developed its own Snapchat clone? Judging from the data, it doesn’t look like it – although Poke enjoyed short-lived success and remains a fairly quiet app. (Facebook might actually have saved itself the scourge of privacy advocates; however. Snapchat’s recent issues over “leaked” photos could have implications concerning underage user photos, and a Poke “leaked” fiasco would surely cause a larger firestorm for a juggernaut like Facebook.)

Facebook Photos are still seeing plenty of use, however, and account for the majority of photo uploads, although that number appears to be slowly declining.

In total, 500 million photos are uploaded and shared and on trend to grow two-fold year-over-year.

What might be interesting to look out for in the next couple of years is the day that photo-sharing and uploads on Snapchat surpasses the volume of shares on Facebook.